Josette Molland, a French Resistance fighter during WWII, eventually captured by the Nazis, who deported her to concentration camps for women, died Feb. 17 at a nursing home in Nice.

The horrors she endured took a visual form in the retelling. Many years after her liberation and return to France, she was worried that the story wouldn’t be told. She began to make a series of paintings depicting her life at Ravensbruck and Holleischen. “I use them to explain to young people in the schools what the human race is capable of, hoping that my testimony will awaken their vigilance so they don’t have to live what I did,” she wrote in an autobiography.

The paintings are frank, leaving little to the imagination. There is no emotion, and the faces are nearly expressionless, powerful in their fairy-tale-like simplicity, The New York Times said.